Thinking of Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson by Willemien Otten (review)

At first glance, the connection between Carolingian philosopher John Scottus Eriugena (810–77) and American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) might seem incidental at best. To begin, Eriugena is a figure widely neglected by both medievalists and theologians. His major piece of writing, On Nature (Periphyseon), is staged as a dialogue between master and student and yet is notoriously dense: it is excessively long, adamantly meandering, and almost impossible to subdivide into central themes or core arguments. Ralph Waldo Emerson is a figure similarly difficult to parse, despite his relative fame at the center of the American Romantic movement. While Emerson is more widely studied than Eriugena, Willemien Otten suggests the importance of a near-medieval dynamism to Emerson's work that is often left undiscussed, with a suggestive mixing of styles, genres, and forms that we are much less likely to find in his contemporary Henry David Thoreau.

What connects both figures in Otten's massively transhistorical Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking is the central phrase of the book's title. Otten's argument centers on the subtraction of a preposition: "thinking nature" as distinct from "thinking about nature," the latter of which is generally how we consider Eriugena, Emerson, and other naturalist thinkers and theologians and their relationship to the environment. The phrase "thinking nature" becomes subversive precisely through the similar grammatical shift of "thinking" from verb to adjective. To consider a "thinking nature," as Otten argues Eriugena and Emerson both do, is to ascribe nature a larger degree of agency and empowerment. Otten rejects both the human and divine framing of nature encountered within Western theology and demands we shift our attention from language as an instrumentalized object of thought to an independent subject of consideration. Eriugena and Emerson are the two largest proponents of Otten's project precisely for their ability to hold space for nature's ability to dictate thought while still considering the essential link between nature and selfhood, as nature is no longer a mere tool for "thinking" but rather a subject with its own capacity for independent thought.

Otten's argument is not without a moral dimension. Both Emerson and Eriugena are, despite the large gap between the modern and the premodern, heavily invested in the notion of nature as a space that remains "perennially unperturbed" and infinitely malleable (8). The narrative of crisis Otten is working against has only gained more cultural currency in recent years: the assignation of victimhood to natural space is one that only further marginalizes it, as we no longer just strip it of resources but also of agency and self-definition. Otten is similarly attuned to the question of the Anthropocene and the formulation of not only nature-as-subject but also upon what criterion we define the human as an ontological category. Her first chapter centers on the premise that nature is ultimately there before we are, a premise in which human identity has historically been a project of differencing ourselves from nature, seeking independence from our label as natural beings. An acknowledgement of nature as not only essential from our constitution of selfhood but as a nonvictim is an argument that, at its heart, holds conservation as a primary ethic: by according nature independence, agency, and integrity, we are more likely to treat it with respect in our everyday lives.

The book is divided into two major parts, which not only read Eriugena and Emerson but also attempt to situate them within their respective historical periods and illustrate how they both align with or diverge from other major thinkers. The sections on Eriugena primarily read his work alongside that of Maximus the Confessor (580–662) and Augustine (354–430), in reverse chronological order, while the sections on Emerson pair him with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and William James (1842–1910). Chapter 1 develops what Otten terms the Eriugenaian-Emersonian axis of thinking nature, rejecting misguided concerns about...